Good
questions are at the heart of good inquiry. They should be
higher-order,
rich,
worthy,
essential and/or
fertile. They are often open-ended (have no right or wrong answer) but are
backed by subsidiary questions which are usually closed. Get the initial
question right and the rest of the inquiry flows well.

Young children and those new to inquiry will need
help in framing the initial question or problem. The ultimate aim is for them to
be able to frame their own questions for inquiry but initially they will need
teacher guidance to do this.

Yoram
Harpaz and Adam Lefstein in their 'Communities
of Thinking' article advocate the use of fertile questions. These have the
following characteristics:

Open - there
are several different or competing answers.

Undermining -
makes the learner question their basic assumptions.

Rich - Cannot
be answered without careful and lengthy research. Usually able
to be broken into subsidiary questions.

Connected -
relevant to the learners.

Charged - has
an ethical dimension

Practical -
Is able to be researched given the available resources.

Not all questions for
inquiry need to meet all these criteria. On the
Galileo Education Network's website they talk about essential
questions such as "What is light?" that are "poised
at the boundary of the known and the unknown." They also use
the term "worthy question" to describe the questions that form the
basis of inquiry.

Jamie McKenzie in a
recent article
The (merely)
Demanding Question discusses the difference between essential
questions and demanding questions. He discusses how both share two
traits - they require original thought and produce new
understanding. Essential questions however, he believes, go a step
further and meet the tests of significance, the "So what?" test.

On the
Youthlearn site they list what they consider to be the
characteristics of good questions: